Most of the non-financial factors were used for their complimentary value. Specifically non-financial factors
such as increasing the number of customers, improving employee skills, increase employee satisfaction and
improving product quality received the level of “important” from 40%-55% of the companies replied.
As was discussed earlier, each of the ten factors included within the questionnaire are generally accepted as
having the potential to influence the performance of any company. Nevertheless, companies with certain or
unique characteristics (sector of activity, product mix, production process, competitors etc) are expected to
acknowledge a limited importance or indifference to one or more of the factors under consideration. This
acknowledgement was expressed via the low percentages of respondent replies on factors considered as “Slightly
Important”, “not very important” and “unimportant”.
Increasing market share was not ranked especially highly by respondents. It received the highest percentages in
the categories of “not very important” (15%) and “unimportant” (30%). These results are relatively unsurprising
since all the companies surveyed were small sized and operating in large national markets. As a result,
quantifying and targeting market share is hard to achieve and not seen as essential for such small entities.
The next question required that respondents indicate how important financial and non-financial performance
measures were within their companies (question number 6, see appendix 1). The results correlate with the overall
level of importance attached to the ten individual performance factors discussed earlier. 85% of respondents
from UK companies stated that the use of financial measures were very important, with only 30% stating that
non-financial measures were very important. This is according to the observation projected previously that there
is a strong favourability within the UK companies to financial factors. Additionally, 55% of respondents stated
that non financial measures are just important for the company, 10% believe that they are slightly important and
5% that are unimportant to the company.